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N-rays and the semantic view of scientific progress

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Abstract

This paper challenges a recent argument of Bird’s, which involves imagining that Réné Blondlot’s belief in N-rays was true, in favour of the view that scientific progress should be understood in terms of knowledge rather than truth. By considering several variants of Bird’s thought-experiment, it shows that the semantic account of progress cannot be so easily vanquished. A key possibility is that justification is only instrumental in, and not partly constitutive of, progress.

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Acknowledgements

My work on this paper was supported by the John Templeton Foundation, as part of the project ‘Why “Why?”—Methodological and Philosophical Issues at the Physics–Biology Interface’.

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